No Capital? No Problem!

So today twice I heard that the client has a capital spending freeze and won't we doing anything. This pisses me off especially when its a partner or another sales guy. I mean what the hell does that matter? and buddy that means you aren't talking to the right people. Lets first of all all agree where money for IT comes from. Does it come from a sum of money that was set aside at the beginning of the year by Finance because IT will need something? Well yes in rare instances in growing economies maybe but lets look further. Money is nothing but cashflow for any company or organization. In order to survive there has to be a steady supply of cash to pay to keep things going. This money when pooled or summed is often called an operating budget, and are really a tally of what it cost lost year adjusted for inflation if people are lucky. When a client says they are not spending Capital they are saying that they don't have access to cash outside of their operating budget to buy anything, or hasn't sufficient reason to ask for it. Your job is to find out how they can save sufficient money in year to pay for your service to have excess operating budget. For instance if your service or solution saves 100k in service downtime for their clients or IT overtime, or reduces the amount of licenses the company has to buy that year then you have 10k of theirs. If one of these savings is on the list of the CXO's to do list (KPI) you have a compelling argument to have the operating budget adjusted and a Capital Expense PO cut for you. The trick is to prove it!